Cinemaniacal: Don't You Forget About Me...

Yesterday, March 24 2014, was the 30th anniversary of the setting of the teen classic The Breakfast Club. In case you lived in a cave during the 1980s The Breakfast Club was about five very different kids, a jock, a criminal, a 'princess,' a nerd, and a social outcast who are stuck with each other in detention all day on Saturday, March 24, 1984 for various offences.

Over the course of the day they get to know each other beyond the social facades that  had defined them and their high school lives. 

That movie was funny, sincere, and moving and it made John Hughes an important filmmaker for a generation of movie goers, and deserving of some appreciation.

John Hughes was a midwestern boy who started out selling jokes to stand up comedians, the most famous probably being Rodney Dangerfield, which led to work in advertising, and eventually with National Lampoon magazine. That led to working in films, achieving success with National Lampoon's Vacation, directed by Harold Ramis, and starring Chevy Chase.

That film's success, and the prodding of Ramis, allowed Hughes to start directing his own films. Since they were inexpensive, small scale comedies, they didn't attract much meddling from the studios. Which seemed to be just perfect for him, because he was going to produce a filmmaking revolution.

Before John Hughes "teen" films had been divided into three camps: 

1. Nostalgic reminiscences of bygone eras with lots of period music and filters over the lenses. 

2. Overly sincere and downright preachy cautionary tales about the dangers of this and that behaviour.

3. Loud obnoxious comedies where 25-30 year old actors pretended to be teenagers in plots that were just vehicles to get the female cast members to take their tops off.

Hughes directorial debut Sixteen Candles broke the mould by being none of those three. It wasn't nostalgic, no one was in danger of anything worse than a bad case of embarrassment, and no one took off their top. The lead actress Molly Ringwald was actually the age she was playing, and she looked it.

The film became a sleeper hit in theatres, and had a whole second life on home video, and paved the way for The Breakfast Club, and Hughes pretty much became a genre onto himself.

That genre was films aimed at teenagers that didn't look down on teenagers as slavering morons who will take whatever crap is given to them as long as it was "trendy." Hughes' teenage characters were portrayed not as vehicles for gags, or targets for ogling, they were portrayed as people. Human beings with all the ups and downs of life amplified by the simple fact that teenagers are great at turning such trivia into melodrama. For the most part they weren't classical villains or heroes, sex-mad oafs, or cautionary examples heading down the road of self destruction, they were just normal kids, trying to make it to the next day.

Put a bunch of modern teens in front of a John Hughes movie, and their reaction is usually awed wonder. They see the films as speaking to them in much the same way kids of my generation saw them.

That's a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Maybe it was because Hughes based his characters not on what other filmmakers did before him, but on the people he knew growing up. Even his most fantastical creation: Ferris Bueller, had roots in reality. Ferris was based on Hughes' high school best friend who prided himself on his ability to talk and charm his way in to and out of any situation.

According to legend that friend grew up to become a big wheel attorney, representing a lot of big names including former vice president Dick Cheney.

Eventually Hughes moved onto other kinds of films, making classic comedies like Planes, Trains, & Automobiles, and writing and producing mega-hits like Home Alone.

However the death of friend and collaborator John Candy, and the increasing frustration of working in Hollywood just got too much for Hughes. He dropped out of the public eye, only occasionally writing or executive producing project from his base in the midwest.

His death in 2009 was a real shock to people of my generation, it was like a piece of our childhood had died along with it. 

Also, his particular brand of teen film seems to have died with him. Replaced by broad gross out comedies and sex farces populated by fashion models and pop stars instead of people who seem designed more for marketing than storytelling.

It's a shame.

Idea Versus Execution… : The Beast Must Die!

Today I'm starting a new feature here on the blog. A discussion of films that had a good idea behind them, but a terribly flawed execution.

For the first of what might be many, I'm taking a look at The Beast Must Die! from Amicus Productions.

Amicus was a British film company founded by two American producers Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg. Their first productions in the early 1960s were teen-oriented musical comedies, but later they moved on to making horror films, following in the footsteps of rival Hammer Films. While they shared many staff, stars, and occasionally styles, there were differences. Hammer Films tended to be period pieces, while Amicus set most of their films in the more affordable present. Also Amicus found their niche making portmanteau anthology films, linking several short horror stories together in one film.

One of their best known non-anthology horror films was The Beast Must Die! based on a short story by James Blish. The premise of the film is the clever idea. Millionaire big-game hunter Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) and his wife Caroline (Marlene Clark) are hosting a weekend get-together at their country estate deep in the middle of nowhere somewhere in England. The guests are Arthur Bennington (Charles Gray) – a diplomat, Jan and Davina Gilmore (Michael Gambon and Ciaran Madden) – a pianist and his ex-student, now lover, Paul Foote (Tom Chadbon) – an artist recently released from prison after a stunt that involved him eating human flesh and Prof. Lundgren (Peter Cushing) an archaeologist and a lycanthropy enthusiast.

Now it looks like an otherwise ordinary weekend, but Mr. Newcliffe has some eccentricities. He's ringed the whole estate with an electrified fence, put cameras and sensors on almost every tree in the forest, monitored by an employee named Pavel (Anton Diffring) and has stocked up on guns and silver bullets.

You see Newcliffe has tired of hunting natural man-eaters, and wants to graduate to the supernatural. All of his guests were in the same places at the same times of a series of werewolf based murders. He's determined that one of them is the guilty party, and he using every trick in the book to expose the beast and hunt it down.

That's the good part. The premise, sort of like Agatha Christie, but with supernatural throat ripping. They even try to lay down some science on the story explaining lycanthropy as a form of infectious disease.

However, where the film falls apart pretty much at the beginning, and never really recovers. The falling starts at the opening theme which sounds like it was stock music composed for a buddy cop movie instead of a horror film.

The directing is lacklustre to the point that you get the feeling that the director was completely uninterested in making a horror film. 

Then there were the limits of budget and technology. The cinematography ranges from bland to poor. Most of the "night" scenes were shot using the cheaper "day for night" processes, which basically make the night scenes look like poorly lit daytime scenes.

Then came the design of the werewolf itself.

To save money they decided to just get a large dog and make it up to look all wolfish and weird.

But the dog often appears with its tongue lolling about and wagging its tail. It's too damn friendly to be a scary werewolf.

The cast are all very game, and most try to work as well as they could in such a quickly slapped together production. Though star Calvin Lockhart plays Newcliffe as if he just walked off a production of Henry V and proceeds to chew more scenery than the werewolf. His arch performance may have been more fitting if the film was down in an over-the-top visual style instead of its bland semi-realism.

Also the 30 second "Werewolf Break" giving the audience a chance to guess who was the werewolf, seems like the sort of gimmick they would have rejected in a more innocent era as corny.

So what we have here, is a novel idea, a "horror whodunnit" if you will, that was fundamentally ruined with a weak execution.

Do you have any films you would like to nominate as a case of Good Idea versus Poor Execution?

Hollywood Babble On & On #1070: Little Budgets Need Big Ambitions

I like low budget movies.

Or to be precise, I like good low budget movies.

I also respect low budget movies with ambition. Even if they're not my particular cup of tea in style, subject matter, or even fail utterly creatively, I can at least respect their attempt to step beyond the constraints of their finances, genre, or talents of the filmmakers.

Take the people behind the Insidious franchise. The first one had a production budget of about $1.5 million, and made about $97 million at the box office, and the sequel Insidious: Chapter 2 has made over $41 million on its opening weekend and judging from audience reaction could at least repeat, if not better the first film's performance. 

It doesn't matter if I like the films or not, I haven't seen them, so I can't judge them, but it does mean that I can respect the ambition and hard work behind them and their success.

However, what I find hard to respect is the trend for making "deliberately bad" cinema as some sort of post-modern ironic form of anti-entertainment.

I can't appreciate such films which the makers see as a license for laziness in almost every aspect. The premises are composed via Mad Libs, you're lucky if the dialogue even went through a first draft, some "I can't believe they hired them" stunt-casting, and loads of shitty CGI special effects that can out-done by an adolescent and their home computer.

There's very little imagination, and very few calories burned to make these films.

So I end this mini-rant with a plea.

Please stop supporting, or promoting deliberately bad movies. There are more than enough inadvertently bad movies released every year, we don't need anymore. Support and promote movies where it looks like some effort was put into the production. Even if they fail, at least respect that they tried.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1044: ShartNado

The SyFy Network is beating the drum that their latest low rent crap-o-rama SharkNado, about a tornado dropping sharks on people, was a huge success.

Their metric was that the movie generated over 5,000 tweets a minute about it during its premiere.

However, in the real world, their original movie was a ratings disaster, generating only a little more than 1.3 million views, which is pretty bad, even for cable.

So what happened?

Basically the whole thing had the air of a really bad joke right from the beginning. People were willing to joke about it, in fact lots of people were willing to joke about it, but very few people were willing to invest the time and mental/emotional/aesthetic punishment required to actually watch it.

And that's the root of the problem with SyFy's original movies.

They're bad jokes.

Bad, lazily composed, jokes with even worse CGI.

Even I joked on Twitter that SharkNado got the green-light because they have two big wheels at SyFy HQ, each covered in random words. They spin the wheels and whatever words come out on top are combined and that's the premise of the next movie. They then reach into a barrel filled with the names of washed up or otherwise unemployable "stars," and voila, they gotta movie!

I now realize that such online japery is part of the problem. SyFy is now using it as a sign of victory, and while it's obvious that such strategies don't work, I've never met a media company that's found a bad idea they just couldn't give up.

And the saddest part is that it is possible to make watchable entertaining science fiction, horror, and fantasy, for television on a low or even micro-budget. Going for badness in the name of "campiness" is a cover for extreme laziness and unoriginality.

I know it's possible, because I've seen it done.

When I was a kid some of the scariest movies I saw weren't R-Rated slash-fests that were all over the theatres back then. They were TV movies, shot with low budgets and tight schedules, and made up for their limited resources with two little things called story, and creativity.

There's no reason why those can't be used today to make science fiction, fantasy, and horror films for television other than laziness and fear of originality.

It's what makes hits, and while it requires actual work, the results will be way more satisfying.

Damn, I'm sounding like a cranky old man.

Hey! 

You kids!

GET OFF MY LAWN!

Hollywood Babble On & On #1024: Who's Laughing?

The folks at The Wrap are pondering the state of Hollywood movie comedy and they don't seem to confident. A lot of expected big budget blockbusters are under-performing despite tons of hype and more tonnage of money spent, and the comedies that do perform well at the box-office aren't doing the big business that their predecessors did not that long ago.

So what's up?

There are three possible reasons:

1. NATURAL CYCLES

Everything follows patterns and cycles. Sometimes those patterns and cycles are so complicated that our puny mortal minds are unable to grasp them. When we reach the end of a cycle and not know we can end up scratching our heads and furrowing our brows in a feeble attempt to understand why what we expected to happen didn't happen. 

The popularity of certain kinds of movies come and go. We can't say when they come and when they go, it involves a lot of blind luck and having the right film at the right place and time.

2. UNREAL EXPECTATIONS

If a film like the first Hangover comes out of nowhere and does big business the studio mindset is to immediately go bigger. Sometimes it works, but you can easily run into the law of diminishing returns. Costs go up, profit margins thin, and the unending demand to go bigger and louder strains the imagination of the creative team. You end up with a studio thinking that bigger movies will result in bigger returns ending up usually getting the opposite.

Then there's the overestimation of the star power of certain players. Tina Fey is a classic example. If you go solely by the media hype she gets you would probably think that she is the be-all-end-all of popular American comedy. Fey is talented, but she's not anywhere near as popular as Hollywood thinks she is. She's been in some modestly successful films, but her live action movies don't crack that precious $100 million mark that even relatively small studio films need to hit for the leads to be properly considered "movie stars." Her television show 30 Rock fared even worse with audiences somehow managing to stay on NBC for 7 seasons despite it being at or near the bottom of the ratings for its entire run. However, Hollywood tends to believe its own hype, and are then shocked to see her starring vehicle just disappear and be forgotten when they were fully expecting it to be a big hit and maybe snag a few award nominations.

3. NARROW IMAGINATIONS

Back in the old days when a team that worked as well as the Hangover trio was discovered they didn't necessarily jump into a sequel if they thought it would involve the flogging of a deceased equine in the concept department. 

They would look for other vehicles that the team could participate in. This meant that the creative-starring partnership wasn't wrapped up entirely in one franchise, and if that franchise started to under perform, it would invite unfavourable comparisons to other projects they might work together on.

But instead, they would aim for sequels, sequels, sequels. That's the sort of franchise they can wrap their little brains around.

Then there's the novelty factor. A joke always gets the biggest laugh the first time it's heard. Which is a long winded way of saying that key ingredient of successful comedy is a steady stream of new ideas and new talent. However, comedy in Hollywood seems to be dominated by several small cliques of elite "A-List" stars and their immediate social circle. There doesn't seem to be much independent comedy getting much play in theatres either, which means that there's the risk of a comedy talent drought when the current crop burns themselves out.

There's a lively comedy scene on the internet, but while some make work in the slightly more open and responsive field of television, the big screen has more or less ignored it so far.

And then there's the fourth reason...

4. TOO MUCH CRAP

For every big monster comedy hit, there were at least ten films as bad or almost as bad as...

So you can understand why the audience might be a little leery of trusting Hollywood's taste in comedy.

Hollywood Babble On & On #973: Who Needs A Title?

I know I'm not the only one to notice that studios are developing a rather silly habit.  That habit is that when they're adapting a novel that's part of a long running and well thought of series they don't use the title of the book, instead they just slap on the main character's name.

For example Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess Of Mars becomes...

Lee Child's One Shot becomes...

And even James Patterson's Cross, which already has the lead's name in the title didn't have enough of his name in the title because they have to change it to...

Even comic books aren't immune, the reboot of the Judge Dredd franchise was simply titled...

Because mentioning that he's a judge in the title distracted from his name.

 

Now you're probably wondering why studios are doing this, and the answer is simple. It's all about "branding."

 

The marketing gurus tell the executives that they're not in the business of making and selling movies, they're in the business of selling "brands."

 

Brands are familiar names attached to franchises that can sell movies, books, and assorted merchandise. The marketing geniuses declare that the audience is just too stupid to look beyond a catchy title to buy into a franchise.

 

Using this mind-set it seems perfectly okay to take a title like A Princess of Mars, which is dripping with hints of exotic cultures, and a faraway planet with strange creatures and adventures, and replace it with John Carter. Even though John Carter sounds like the title of a biopic of an ex-athlete turned teacher who gets inner city kids to love Shakespeare by putting King Lear to the beats of Dr. Dre.

 

Does this strategy work?

 

Well, John Carter, Alex Cross, and Dredd all pretty much tanked at the box-office, and  Jack Reacher isn't tracking very well with audiences on the eve of its release, so you tell me.

 

What does the real world tell us about selling a franchise?

 

Well, it tells us a very different story.

 

The longest running and most successful franchise in movie history is the James Bond franchise. Can you guess what the James Bond franchise does when it comes to titles? 

 

They never use James Bond's name in the title.

 

The villains have had their names in the title, but never Bond.

 

That's because the job of the title is to sell the adventure Bond is going on, not some "brand." 

 

But the twist is that by using the titles to sell the adventures, they do a bang up job of selling the James Bond brand.

 

Sure, coming up with a catchy title for a movie is hard work, but I think it's a lot more effective than just plucking up a name and hoping for the best.   

Hollywood Babble On & On #972: The Christmas Movie Conundrum

Does it seem that there has been a shrinking number of Christmas movies being released theatrically by a major studio. There were none in 2010, only 1 in 2011 called Arthur Christmas which I had to look up because audiences seemed to forget it about five minutes after they watched it, and this year the only thing remotely Christmas adjacent that I've heard of is Rise of the Guardians, which is something to do with Santa turning into Rambo for some reason but even that fizzled at the box office.

There are still some Xmas stuff on TV and straight to video, but they don't really count.

Hollywood used to love to make Christmas movies. They were relatively inexpensive to make, they generally did pretty well, and the really good ones could become classics that are played annually either as theatrical re-releases during the Golden Age, later on becoming perennial TV favorites, or regular home video sellers.

 

Even the cheesy, insincere, stupid or overly saccharine flops still had potential for a second life as seasonal filler on deep cable.

So why have the major studios seemed to have given up on what used to be a bread and butter sub-genre?

Well there are two theories, or to be more exact, one theory, and one fact, since it comes from me.

The theory comes from political and social conservatives who feel that Hollywood is hostile to Christians, their values, and express that through a hostility to Christmas.

While there does appear to be hostility toward the bulk of America's population because they believe in something beyond their own fabulousness, most of it stems from a willful ignorance enforced by Hollywood's group-think culture.

However, I think that's just a small part of what is a bigger picture.

My theory, which is fact since I'm always right, is all about capability. 

To make a Christmas movie that doesn't want to make the audience want to set the screen on fire you need the ability to feel and express sincere emotions cinematically without smug irony/sarcasm, slapstick idiocy, or hammer handed bombast.

Can you name anyone in Hollywood capable or willing to do that? 

*crickets*

Exactly.

The audience seems to know that too, even if it's on an entirely subconscious level.

Cinemaniacal: Put Some Suspenders On Your Disbelief!

You readers just keep giving me good questions. This time it's one that inspires me to tackle a very involved issue. Here's an edited version of the question...

Fuloydo asked...

OK, here's a question for the next "Answering Questions" post.

Background: I just tried to watch (turned it off about half-way through) the movie 'Journey 2: The Mysterious Island'

My question is as follows:

How stupid does Hollywood think the movie going public is?

I understand suspension of disbelief and I know the current educational system is turning out it's fair share of morons but, really.

Okay, the short answer to that question is that Hollywood thinks the audience is EXTREMELY STUPID. They also believe that the younger the audience the dumber the audience. This causes Hollywood to terribly abuse an essential part of storytelling that you mentioned, mostly out of sheer laziness.

I'm talking about the "willing suspension of disbelief."

For those of you who have never heard the term the willing suspension of disbelief is where the audience accepts the impossible for the sake of enjoying the story they're being told.

It's how we can accept that Superman can fly, or that Peter Parker got super-powers instead of a horrible disease from that radioactive spider.

Now suspension of disbelief only works if the impossible elements of the story follow some sort of internal logic that gives it the illusion of reality.

Superman can fly because he's from another planet with a different level of gravity, and a different kind of sun, etc... etc... yadda... yadda... And that he exists in a universe where that sort of thing makes sense.

This internal logic is specific to the genre you're working in. The internal logic of science-fiction stories must have at least a scientific sounding basis, and the internal logic of fantasy stories must have some sort of magical basis that's appropriate to the story.

Now the problem is that to do it all right requires two things:

1. A working knowledge of the genre you're working in, including the what seems rational within the rules of that genre, and what doesn't.

2. Respecting that your audience has at least a functioning brain cell that requires a decent explanation. 

But to do that takes work.

When making a movie like Journey 2: The Mysterious Island that's predominantly aimed at kids the temptation is to just forget about rationality and logic, and just whip up some lazy excuses for tossing in lots of special effects because that will keep the little bastards dazzled enough to make their parents pay for tickets.

Now while it might work in the short term, like Journey 2's healthy box office, it's not a very good strategy for the film's long term viability.

Poor suspension of disbelief makes films seem increasingly "silly" and "childish" over time, and they don't profit from repeat viewers on alternative mediums.

So it actually behooves a storyteller to put a little extra effort when putting together their premise to make things, if not realistic, at least realistic looking.

Hollywood Babble On & On #916: Go Digital Or Go Home?

Christopher Nolan, the master of the intelligent blockbuster, made two announcements at a recent conference of people in the movie business. The first one is that he's not going to do another Batman movie, which is probably a sensible call, and the second is that he doesn't care for digital film-making, preferring to keep using film until they pry the last reel from his cold dead hands.

Okay, I exaggerate his stance a little bit. 

He really just believes that digital film-making hasn't quite reached the technical and economic standards that he thinks film still has, and won't get into using digital cameras until they do.

He might be right, he's way deeper into the current technology than I am, but he's also speaking from a bubble of great comfort. If he wants to shoot on film no studio, especially not Warner Bros. is going to say no to a man whose movies have made well over a billion dollars at the box office in the past 10 years.

Everyone else though has to accept the certain home truth that digital is inevitable.

I can understand Nolan's ambivalence, and I will give him credit for acknowledging that he's not completely writing off digital. That would be like writing off sound or color, a blatant denial of the fact that the medium is changing via new developments in technology, and if you don't learn to use it, you're going to lose it.

I for one welcome the coming of digital technology, for two reasons...

1. It's cheaper than film.

2. It's easier to work with than film.

Now the big studios are thinking that it's a great thing since it chops millions off the costs of production and distribution.

That's a good thing for them, but also a bad thing for them. And what makes it a bad thing for them makes it a good thing for film as both an art & a business.

Does that make any sense to you?

Then allow me to explain...

Right now competing with the big studios has three major hurdles...

1. The high cost of production.

2. The high cost of distribution.

3. The high cost of marketing.

Digital film-making slashes a lot of the expense from production and distribution. Couple that with alternative mediums born from the digital revolution and the marketing opportunities that come from that, the cost of marketing movies can also be brought under control.

Also, digital technology is constantly improving thanks to the intense competition between equipment manufacturers while film has pretty much hit its peak, and I don't see it going any farther. So digital will reach a level capable of pleasing Christopher Nolan a lot sooner than anyone will think.

The revolution will be digitized my friends.